Join the new world

I've spent some time reading up on the new economic module. I haven't played erepublik since v2. I could be entirely wrong on all of this. If you see anything incorrect or if I got the wrong impression please let me know!

It appears that the basis of it is that you can have one cash job as usual, but in addition to that you can build as many companies as you want, and those companies will be attached to you as a person and you can work once in each of them. So if you have 20 companies you can work 20 times, producing huge amounts of goods for yourself.



The first immediate goal seems to be to get lots of food, which is not hard. A single grain company and a single food company produces 280 energy a day, which is enough to work 28 times, a net gain of 26 times.

This seems to lead to a situation where goods produced by yourself in companies is essentially free, so selling them for anything would be profit. Of course the initial investment to set all this up is hundreds of gold, and companies like Q7 weapons cost over 1000 gold to produce. 1000 gold! In v1 that was more than most countries had, but here it is beans.



This leads to an interesting situation where you put hundreds of gold into your companies, but selling your products for 0.01 would technically yield a profit that would eventually pay itself off. Hiring employees only makes sense where you are willing to pay their salary rather than build a new factory, even though the factory would produce for free in the long term.

Consequently, the prices for goods are really really low. Additionally national currency is worth 6-8 times less than it was worth in v1. So it is really really hard to convert your goods back into gold to reinvest in more companies.

In v1 companies were a really big investment that required lots of dedicated workers. Big company owners cashed in big time. It created a working class and a factory owning class. Those classes do not exist at all in this format, which makes for an interesting but non conventional economy.

The best way to be successful, it seems, is to produce all of your own goods. Try to minimize and eliminate everything you buy from the market. Use gold and conventional salary to make bigger investments in companies. Slowly you will have so much worthless surplus that the tiny quantities you sell them for will add up to enough to give real income.



However, if your goal is to simply meet your own needs, so you can fight a ton with weapons, that is a significantly easier goal. Who, then, is going to buy this tremendous surplus of goods? If everyone can produce near infinite goods with impunity? Are we relying on a certain percentage of the population to be poor? What happens if that falls apart? I'm a little disturbed by how strangely unstable this new system seems.

What do you think? How has your experience with the system been? I am only starting to understand things so maybe I have silly ideas.

Additionally, what is the incentive to upgrade a food company? It has the same ratio of raw materials to energy gain... Does the company still produce 140 items? Even so why not build a second one as the smaller items might be preferable to avoid waste?

-Elisa